New Paintings

New Paintings

As a long-term loan from a private collection, the painting “Fall Flowers (A)” from the year 1931 has just recently enriched the Nolde Foundation Seebüll’s collection, and supplements the stock of oil paintings with flowers from the Seebüll garden.

For the painting, Nolde arranged a generous selection of late-summer flowers from the Seebüll garden. They reflect the brilliant finale of the perennials in the cottage garden, which was planned to align with Nolde’s summer stay in Seebüll; he generally spent his winters in Berlin. Nolde arranged the yellow-orange glowing basket of sunflowers with individual lush green leaves, red and white gladiolus stems, a multi-coloured bunch of various dahlias, as well as blue flowers in the middle ground, perhaps delphinium or geranium, to create a potpourri of colour and forms. They shine so freshly that it seems as though the flowers had just been cut. Neither the barely discernible foreground nor the dark background allow conclusions to be drawn about the location.

In their daily life, flowers surrounded the Noldes everywhere, both in the Berlin apartment as well as in Seebüll. There in a special flower parlour Ada grew house plants, which continued the garden’s blaze of colours through the entire house on windowsills and tables. Nolde laid out the garden at the same time the residential and studio house Seebüll was constructed in 1927, and playfully arranged it to trace the initials A and E (for Ada and Emil). Through the symbiosis of architecture and artist’s garden, this created a Gesamtkunstwerk in the amphibian landscape of Gotteskoog. The opulently blooming perennials, annuals, bi-annuals, dahlias and poppies quickly changed the garden into a colourful carpet of flowers. Just one year after moving there, Nolde reported to his friend Hans Fehr about the “young garden with its bursting abundance of flowers, more beautiful than we have ever had before. The sunflowers rise so high and I stand grateful and amazed before their beauty with my neck craning backwards. Here there has been a series of the most beautiful days, almost inconceivable colours glowing, and the fragrance of reseda is carried right into the house.”

Besides the long-term loan, five more paintings will be exhibited in Seebüll for the first time.